Overdue: the Country of Literature

A couple of years ago a 57-year-old in Hancock Michigan was searching through the attic of his family home, when he opened a box and a dusty copy of a book called “Prince of Egypt” fell out. He flicked to the back cover and discovered that it was a library book forty-seven years overdue. Over the years, the book had been misplaced and boxed and re-boxed and misplaced again.

The man, Robert Nuranen, went down to his local library and lay it down on the counter in front of the startled librarian. She totalled the fees and it came out to $171.32. He left the library with a receipt from a transaction that was due on June 2, 1960, when he was ten years old.

I’m not sure where I read the story, or why I remember it so well, but there are times we come upon parts of our old lives that bring us around to where we once were. John Berger has said: “If I had known as a child what the life of an adult would have been, I never would have believed it, I never could have believed it would be so unfinished.” Unfinished it always is — until it can’t be any longer. Many of us would give as much as $171.32 – if not a whole lot more – to be able to return to the past in such a small intimate manner.

I hardly know what book it was that I was reading forty-seven days ago, let alone forty-seven months. Yet the curious thing about how time eludes us is how forcefully other, more distant times actually return to us. We may not remember yesterday, but the texture of decades ago can hit us with the force of an axe.

I was seven years old when I first read Mary Lavin’s “The Second Best Children in the World.” It was a book that my father, a journalist with the Evening Press, brought home to me and which he and my mother read at my bedside, but I can still remember it as if the bread is only now coming out of the oven.

I knew nothing about Mary Lavin at that stage, in 1972, but the story that she conjured up (about Ben who’s ten, and Kate who’s eight, and the other, Matt, who is “so small that I can hardly see him at all”) was powerful to me. The kids decide that – in order to give their parents a rest – they will go on a long trip around the world. As they don’t want to wear out the soles of their shoes, they walk always on their heels, but soon their shoes grow too small. They return home, having grown up and experienced all sorts of adventures, but Lavin doesn’t treat it as a moment of terror or loss. Instead, the parents come running from the house with open arms and call them the “best children in the world.” The kids disagree and their answer is a pour of cool water along the spine. Ben, Kate and Matt say that if they were the best children in the world, they never would have left in the first place. So they’re second best. And happy to be so. They have gone and they have come back changed. They would have experienced nothing if they had not left. To be best is to be static. To be second best is to slide a little knife-blade of difficulty into the journey.

It strikes me now, years later, that the book is a song for the emigrant. There is something in the emigrant’s spirit where he or she realizes that they will always, only, a form of second best. Leaving is a form of creating and instilling memory. It is also a way to inflict a damage upon oneself. Emigrants seem to want to scar themselves in order to remember where they came from. This is neither a pillar of light nor, I hope, a whine. We leave, we go away, we walk on our heels for a while, we outgrow our shoes, and occasionally we are given the grace of being able to go home.

This is what books do, also. Like countries, we leave them for a while, but having been there we are always going to come back, in one form or another. Occasionally they will sit in the attic. But they will eventually be found, one way or another. I’m happy to have stumbled upon that book forty-three years ago now.

Apeirogon

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Video Trailer for Apeirogon

This is the first in a series of short videos where Colum McCann talks about his new novel, Apeirogon. “A work of incredible magnitude . . . McCann finds the emotional accuracy, the sensitivity, and the beauty to tell the heartbreaking reality of life in Israel-Palestine, while allowing readers a glimmer of necessary hope. Apeirogon is greater…

Welcome to the Newsletter

The good folks at Random House asked me to do an occasional newsletter in the run-up to my new novel, APEIROGON (coming Feb 25, 2020), a glimpse behind the curtain, a step behind the pages, to give a little glance into my world.

Praise for Apeirogon

“Every significant novel is an act of reckless originality. Colum McCann’s Apeirogon is nothing like any book you’ve ever read. Think of reading David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, or George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo for the first time. Think of discovering an entirely unprecedented, and profoundly true, narrative form. Think about feeling that the very idea of the novel, of what it can be and what it’s capable of containing, has been expanded, forever.”—Michael Cunningham, New York Times bestselling author of The Snow Queen

Apeirogon Tour

Apeirogon goes on sale on Feb 25th and tour dates in February and March will include New York, Boston, Portland Oregon, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Mississippi, Ann Arbor Michigan, San Diego, Montclaire New Jersey and more! Also Ireland and England, followed by Australia in May!! Also Edinburgh in August!

Patriots of Elsewhere

The following speech was written and delivered by Colum McCann on the occasion of the PEN/Song Lyrics Award in Boston in September 2016, given to Kathleen Brennan and Tom Waits.

TODAY is a day when literature salutes song and its writers. So, come song: lend me eloquence…

Punched and knocked unconscious after trying to help a woman who had also been assaulted along a busy city street.

National Book Award Interview

Interview conducted by Bret Anthony Johnston. Bret Anthony Johnston: First, congratulations on Let the Great World Spin being named a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction! Do you recall the inception of the book? Was there any image or incident or memory that triggered the writing process? Colum McCann: Thanks so much. One only has to…

Colum McCann talks about winning the National Book Award (IrishCentral)

Colum McCann talks about winning the National Book Award

WTC Provides Back Story For Colum McCann’s ‘Spin’

“What I was most interested in was not so much Philip Petit but the people who were on the ground, the people who walk the sort-of little tightrope of our ordinary everyday moments,” McCann says. The reactions of McCann’s main characters to the stunt range from gripping fear that the tight-rope walker will fall, to…

“McCann joins ranks of the great” (Irish Times)

For Colum McCann, the Dublin-born, New York-based writer whose ‘ Let the Great World Spin’ won the US National Book Award on Wednesday night, the prestigious accolade helped make up for Ireland’s defeat to France – just about, he tells FIONA McCANN